Meet Emmanuel Adebayor - the boy who grew up into Manu: How a skinny kid from Togo beefed up to become the most feared striker in town

Michael Walker visits Metz and finds the footballing folk who were the making of the Manchester City striker.

A fully grown man: Emmanuel Adebayor waves to the City fans this season

On his first day he turned up in full west
African dress. That’s what they remember.
Not for this boy a replica kit, nor a tracksuit
or a pair of boots hanging off anxious
fingers.

No, on the first day of the rest of his
life, on the first day of a journey that might lead to
professional football, on his first day as a resident
of western Europe, Emmanuel Adebayor arrived
Togolese style.

There and then, Evelyne Lopez
suspected this boy could be different.
Soon, all at FC Metz thought
he could be special.

‘He was wearing traditional
costume,’ recalled Lopez of the
afternoon in September 1999 when
Adebayor appeared before her in
Germanic north-east France.

‘And
he didn’t know where he was. I remember it well because on his
last day here, four years later when
he was leaving to join Monaco, he
wasn’t wearing African clothes, he
was head to toe in leather, with a
big leather coat.’

Lopez laughed warmly.

They all
did — Lopez, Nina Recht, Denis
Schaeffer and Philippe Gaillot, a
Metz quartet who knew the first
Adebayor, the 15-year-old fresh
from the Togo-Ghana border city of
Lome. The hopeful Adebayor. He
made an instant impression on
them and a lasting one.

‘Toujours cheese,’ said Recht, of
his chirpy demeanour.

‘He was like that,’ said Schaeffer,
holding up an index finger — ‘very
long and very thin’.

Schaeffer is the director of Metz’s
academy.
Ten years on, England knows a
physically different Adebayor —
and it has not been ‘toujours
cheese’. Arsenal fans will vouch for
occasional surliness.

His image here is not the sunny one found in
Metz, although Adebayor has said
this week he is ‘smiling again’.

He has had an immediate impact
at Manchester City. It took Adebayor
three minutes to score on his
City debut at Blackburn and in
three league games he has netted
three goals. It is one reason why,
with Arsenal the visitors to Eastlands on Saturday afternoon, Adebayor’s
£25million face has been decorating
a concourse in Manchester’s
Arndale shopping centre this week.

It seems the bewildered boy of
1999, standing on Allee Saint-
Symphorien outside the canalside
lodgings where Metz house their
academy trainees, has become a
Sky Blue icon already.

Mummy's boy: Adebayor with his mother

Score
against Arsenal, then at Old
Trafford Sunday week and even
after only five Barclays Premier
League games, Adebayor could
retire and still claim to have made a
lasting City impression.
It would not surprise them in
Metz and it would not surprise
them to have ‘Manu’ on the telephone
telling everyone about it.

He
has remained in touch, his opinion
being: ‘Metz did a great job of looking
after me, I was always made to
feel safe and secure.’

Schaeffer said: ‘He could work
and would work. Sometimes we
had to keep him in line but he has a
quality — good social contact. He is one of the boys here who
has left the strongest memories. He
has personality, vitality.

'Even if
sometimes it came too easy to him and he was not concentrating, he
could adapt and work. He was
respectful. Louis Saha was the
same. Like him, Manu has become
a reference point for us.

‘Sometimes he gives the impression
of being different, a bit outside
the rules, but hear this: here he had
to open a bank account when he was
15 and, say, he had 100 euros. Now
he is 25 and has much money, but he
still has the same account with the
same man in Metz.

'"What has
changed?” is what Manu says when
you ask him. Today I can speak with
him as I did 10 years ago.’

Teen spirit: Adebayor early in his career

Like Evelyne Lopez, Nina Recht
works with the boys of Metz’s
45-bed academy that sits beside
the stadium of a club who yo-yo
between the French first and
second divisions. They are
currently in the second.
Recht fulfils the role of ‘second
maman’, she said.

Adebayor appreciated
her for this because, as Recht
recalled, the 15-year-old who left
Togo left behind ‘a strong relationship
with his mother. In the beginning
we spoke a lot about that. He
missed her a lot.’
Adebayor had been spotted by
Metz coach Francis de Taddeo at a
youth tournament in Sweden. Via a
coaching contact in Togo, Camelio
Akoussa, they snapped up
the player at a time when it was permitted.

The age limit has since been
raised to 18 for African teenagers to
enter French academies, which is
one reason why Metz run a venture
in Dakar, Senegal —‘with Senegalese
coaches’, Schaeffer stressed.

Today Adebayor would be off to
Dakar but back then it was to Metz.
Football was the primary motivation
but coming from Togo, where a
United Nations report has estimated
the average wage at less
than one US dollar a day, there were
other considerations.

‘Of course, it was hard to leave
home but nobody said “don’t go”
because they knew what an opportunity
it was for me,’ said Adebayor this
week.

‘It wasn’t just about football, it
was about a way out and a better life. At the airport my mum said, “Go
to France and you can change the
way this family lives”. She knew
that if I succeeded in football we
could have a better life and finally
get out of poverty.

'At 15 I wasn’t
just playing for my own glory, I was
playing for the sake of my family. It was very difficult because when
I was living in Togo most people
were happy for me, but I was sad
because I didn’t know where I was
going.

'This was the first time I was
going to live in Europe. You can’t imagine how freezing it
was in Metz. After one month I told
the boss, “I’m very sorry but I can’t
deal with this any more”.

'Every
time after training, I can’t even take
a shower, I have to be in my room
with the heater on and clothes and
everything. I started crying because
I was 15. He said to me, “Can you imagine
how many Togolese, how many of
your friends, would like to be in
your position?”

And the winner is: Adebayor was African Player of the Year for 2008

‘I didn’t care, I wasn’t happy.
When he left I got my phone and
called my mum. She said, “If you
want to come home then come
home”. You have to fight against all
those things to show you can do something tomorrow.

'Those wars
are always in my head and these are
the things that told me I had a
chance to be there and I had to
take these chances. From that day, every single morning
when I went to training I gave
my best.’

Why I fell out with Bendtner

Emmanuel Adebayor's infamous feud with former Arsenal strike partner Nicklas Bendtner started over a pair of shoes. The two came to blows on the pitch against Spurs and Adebayor revealed: ‘There was a rule where no one is allowed to come into the dressing room with trainers or house shoes on. Nicklas came every day with shoes. I told him he had to respect everyone. There are rules and to take them off. He never did and things started from there.’

Certainly, poverty makes you
pragmatic.

‘Leaving your country,
your very skin, to seek your future
elsewhere — what could be less
natural?’ asked Didier Drogba, but
he, too, left west Africa for France
and even younger, aged five.

Drogba and Adebayor share more
than a striker’s instinct.
Asked to describe the house in
which he grew up, Adebayor
referred to his mother again.

‘There
were many of us living in two
rooms, sometimes up to 10 of us. It was very poor, but we still had
something and we still had each
other. Now my mother has a big, big
house in Lome, but she refuses to
live in it because that is the sort of
woman she is.’

Adebayor added that western
parameters do not apply to Africa.
He has hinted in the past at his own
likely descent into criminality.

‘Lome
is my home and I love my country,’
he said, ‘but it is very different from
other parts of the world. It is not
good trying to compare Africa to
anywhere else, because there is
nowhere else you can compare it to. A lot of my friends are involved in
bad things and the sad fact is that
it is the only option on offer to a lot
of men in Lome.

Then and now: Adebayor's Lome house (top) is a fry cry from the rough streets he grew up on (bottom)

'They do drugs and
drink, not because they really want
to but because they are bored and they have
not been
offered a
way out. I
thank God I
got offered a
way out and
that is why
football will always be
more than a living to me.’

Some Arsenal fans are
outraged by Adebayor’s
move to City, but he has
been refreshingly honest
about the economics of
the transfer.

Recht said: ‘When
someone like Manu
comes over, they want
their parents to be proud
of them and they also want
to help financially. We are
proud of him.’

Metz received an undisclosed
sum when Adebayor left
them for Monaco, aged 19, in
2003. He got an increased salary
and with it a flash motor. Straight
after his Monaco debut, so pleased
with the 4x4 was Adebayor that he
decided to drive north to Metz to
show it off.

‘He fell asleep at the wheel,’ said
Recht.

‘A woman was injured slightly
but he was very correct about it.'

It was not his only Metz disappointment.
Although the warmth
for him was apparent, Schaeffer
and Adebayor’s former team-mate
Gaillot mentioned 2001, when Metz
Under 18s won the league title and
reached the cup final at the Stade
de France.

Adebayor was the leading scorer
but the 17-year-old turned up for
the pre-final hotel meeting five
minutes late and wearing headphones.
He was dropped and forced
to watch the game from the stands.
The amazing stadium must have
looked very different that day.

‘In his next game he was outstanding,’
said Schaeffer.

It was
another sign to them that Adebayor was genuine. The move to
Monaco resulted in a place on
the bench for the 2004 Champions
League final against Porto,
but there are signs for the
Arsenal area in downtown Metz
and the writing was there to be
seen.

Adebayor joined in January
2006 and scored on his debut
at Birmingham. He was 21.
They called him ‘Baby Kanu’
at Arsenal, which he liked. On
his left arm he got tattooed:
‘Only God can judge me’.

Adebayor has enjoyed a superb start to his City career

Some think Arsene Wenger
worthy of that title and the
Arsenal manager appealed to
Adebayor — ‘He was like a
father figure to me’.

On published figures ,
Adebayor put on two stone at
Arsenal, a reminder that
another former Metz junior,
Robert Pires, seemed to change
anatomically at Arsenal.

‘I put on weight because I
needed to become more physical
for the Premier League,’
said Adebayor.

‘I was too thin
to be a striker. At Arsenal, everything is so
strict, from what you eat to how
you treat your body, you would
never be allowed to put on
weight if it was not the right
thing for you.

'I don’t know
exactly how much muscle I put
on, but I saw the benefits. Try
playing against Vidic when you
don’t have enough strength.’

Emmanuel Adebayor has
sufficient strength now. The
strength of belief to say he does
not think this Abu Dhabi Manchester
City is an experiment —
‘because an experiment can go
wrong’ — and to add: ‘I am only
25 and with what City now have
in place, I don’t expect that
(2004) to be the only European
Cup final I will ever play in.

‘The top four and Champions
League football is important,
but there is no reason why we
can’t be looking higher than
fourth place with the players
and manager we have.’

Such views would make
Schaeffer smile.

‘When Manu
was here we were sure he would
be good when “the lights were on”.

'Sometimes he was inconsistent but when a game
mattered, he was always good.

'He liked the show, it was made
for him. He’s a showman.’

Manchester hosts two big
shows in the next eight days
and the boy in the African robes
in Metz has become the face of
them both.